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Linus Torvalds - 3:19 PM - Public

Ok, since I publicly called the guy a f*cking moron, I guess I should also publicly follow up: it does seem Romney was joking.

Whew.

...Move along. Can we get back to hating on proprietary blobs now?

Seems Romney knows about the polls: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByJAC-sfXwumZzI2bVlON2VTMnFyYVZZSnpDYnNyQQ/edit?pli=1

Linus moved to America just so he can have this type of freedom of speech.

In his native country he could be jailed for such talk.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Finland+freedom+speech

http://support.google.com/docs/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=49115

They're replacing the old document formats (XLS, DOC) with the new ones (.DOCX, .XSLX). This won't matter for 99% of people using Google Docs. Personally I'm really excited, I didn't know they supported the new formats at all.

It's not like the Brazilian court is trying to hide something with this order that now it will be 10x public, you know?

I don't like most of limitations to free speech, but you know, I also don't like transnationals corporations acting like they are above the law of the (several) countries they operate.

A court order in Brazil gave an order, and google was in contempt, don't like it? change the law or don't operate there.

Hints:
Google works on the internet. The internet works everywhere (Except Iran, apparently).
Google has no datacenters in Brazil.

So Brazil was trying to enforce ITS laws in OTHER countries, something everyone here is quick to condem when the US does it.
Failing to force the US to change its laws, Brazil takes hostages.

Anyone who understands how security works would consider php's very existence on a server to be a security hole.

There, I fixed it for you. You're welcome.

Not so much PHP (although every function is broken in some way), but the fact that any n00b can pick it up and start "programming." Without a harsh feedback loop, poor coding practices become calcified and lead to the massive security holes you've observed.

The beauty and curse of PHP is that its default fail state is to act as if nothing bad happened. This keeps unskilled, sloppy n00bs from getting so discouraged with the "NO YOU CAN'T FARKING ASSUME null AND false ARE THE SAME THING, DUMMY!" error messages that they find Something Else To Do like become Energy Meter Readers or Sportscasters or Tiger Food.

That is why PHP sucks.

I Blame Apple

Link should be this: hot chicks

https://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=japan&daddr=china&hl=en&ll=33.72434,121.201172&spn=25.784759,46.538086&sll=31.653381,129.682617&sspn=26.369303,46.538086&geocode=FRhxKAIdfJI9CCkvGX_XD05nNDFEUmZ81HVC9Q%3BFZw0IwIdReU1BinBQsblZI5QMTFvNp80fKodlQ&t=h&dirflg=d&mra=ls&z=5

You joke but Google maps does sometimes give you bad suggestions.

So the problem would have been avoided, if Microsoft could sell that electricity again. They might have lost some money (or not, since residential rates are much higher) but wouldn't have to waste the whole thing.

In other countries you get the grid from the local power company but then can pick a provider. Funny enough that works only if there is a strong government organization in charge of "deregulating" the network monopoly. Kind of what the US tried with phone lines before the baby bells got rid of it again.

May be that's why Google got a license to buy/sell energy (See Google Energy)?

"People need to take personal responsibility for their systems and decisions." - by one_who_uses_unix (68992) on Wednesday September 26, @12:46PM (#41465519) Homepage

Per my subject-line above: Agreed, & here's the EASIEST WAY for Windows users to do so @ least

(Via CIS Tool -> http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9018362/CIS_tool_aims_to_help_federal_agencies_check_Windows_security_settings , a MULTI-PLATFORM security test that is FUN to use & do, almost like a performance benchmark, albeit, for system security instead...)

It is also FREE for Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003 users, & timeout version trial is available for Windows 7/Server 2008 users ( The 30-day trial is MORE THAN ADEQUATE to run it, & export the .reg file changes it makes to re-use again).

---

HOW TO SECURE Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003 & even VISTA/Windows7/Server 2008, & make it "fun-to-do":

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=%22HOW+TO+SECURE+Windows+2000%2FXP%22&btnG=Google+Search&gbv=1

---

To "immunize" a Windows system, I effectively use the principles in "layered security" possibles!

http://www.bing.com/search?q=%22HOW+TO+SECURE+Windows+2000%2FXP%22&go=&form=QBRE

I.E./E.G.-> I have done so since 1997-1998 with the most viewed, highly rated guide online for Windows security there really is which came from the fact I also created the 1st guide for securing Windows, highly rated @ NEOWIN (as far back as 1998-2001) here:

http://www.neowin.net/news/apk-a-to-z-internet-speedup--security-text

& from as far back as 1997 -> http://web.archive.org/web/20020205091023/www.ntcompatible.com/article1.shtml which Neowin above picked up on & rated very highly.

That has evolved more currently, into the MOST viewed & highly rated one there is for years now since 2008 online in the 1st URL link above...

Which has well over 500,000++ views online (actually MORE, but 1 site with 75,000 views of it went offline/out-of-business) & it's been made either:

---

1.) An Essential Guide
2.) 5-5 star rated
3.) A "sticky-pinned" thread
4.) Most viewed in the category it's in (usually security)
5.) Got me PAID by winning a contest @ PCPitStop (quite unexpectedly - I was only posting it for the good of all, & yes, "the Lord works in mysterious ways", it even got me PAID -> http://techtalk.pcpitstop.com/2007/09/04/pc-pitstop-winners/ (see January 2008))

---

Across 15-20 or so sites I posted it on back in 2008... & here is the IMPORTANT part, in some sample testimonials to the "layered security" methodology efficacy:

---

SOME QUOTED TESTIMONIALS TO THE EFFECTIVENESS OF SAID LAYERED SECURITY GUIDE I AUTHORED:

http://www.xtremepccentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=672ebdf47af75a0c5b0d9e7278be305f&t=28430&page=2

"I recently, months ago when you finally got this guide done, had authorization to try this on simple work station for kids. My client, who paid me an ungodly amount of money to do this, has been PROBLEM FREE FOR MONTHS! I haven't eve

• Use VPN.
• If you have IPv6 access (you can use tunneling if your ISP does not have native IPv6), download a hosts file at https://code.google.com/p/ipv6-hosts/source/browse/hosts and replace your system's. This will force ipv6 connections to Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and some other sites. Append .sixxs.org to any other sites blocked. GFW does not censor ipv6 traffic for now, presumably because not many people use it.
• Use GoAgent. It's documented in Chinese so you need help from Chinese to setup. In default mode it is very fast, but compromises secured connections. You can setup https mode by sacrificing speed.

There are many other methods, all slowing down your Internet connection substantially, so I'm not going to recommend here.

no, it should be spelled like this

This whole things sounds like good reason for everyone to root for the Google Fiber experiment in Kansas City to be a huge success. If they can prove this as remotely profitable, then there's really no reason not to roll it out everywhere.

https://www.google.com/search?q=ingo+swann+penetration

You know, that's near the DARK side of the moon...

No excuse for not looking things up these days. From Wikipedia:

"In the late nineteenth century, the British and Italians gained control of parts of the coast, and established British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland.[17] In the interior, Muhammad Abdullah Hassan's Dervish State successfully repulsed the British Empire four times and forced it to retreat to the coastal region,[18] but the Dervishes were finally defeated in 1920 by British airpower.[19] Italy acquired full control of their parts of the region in 1927. This occupation lasted until 1941, when it was replaced by a British military administration."

Or just do a search if you're still in doubt.

long cat is looooooooong

There used to be an Italian supermarket in Nth Carlton that sold leg bacon which was the size of a small dinner plate. I don't know if it's still available. We get short cut rindless bacon as a general rule. It doesn't tend to crisp up in the same way, thicker and with less fat, but it gets nicely caramelized.

In Italy they use a lot something called Guanciale, which is pig cheek, cured like bacon. It if fatter (!) and even more tasty. It's the secret to many pasta dishes but it doesn't sound like what you describe.

China has a strategic pork reserve, why doesn't the US?

WE MUST NOT ALLOW A BACON GAP!

While I'm with you on the question of performance, I'd also question the suitability of FPGAs, both as an "open source" platform and as a learning tool for anything below university level courses. FPGAs are about as closed as it gets when it comes to hardware platforms. The verilog/VHDL compilers are, generally, closed source. I know there's an open one or two, but Mentor Graphics, Xilinx, and Altera all ship closed source compilers. The place and route algorithms that are used are all patented and closed source. The architecture of the FPGA itself is patented and closed source.

So, what, exactly, is the point of using an "open" processor on an FPGA? To make everything harder to do?

If you're really looking for a Free/Open processor, then your best bet is to put your money where your mouth is and back opencores.org in producing an ASIC version of the OpenRISC 1000. Even then, it's still built on a proprietary process in a fab, where you can't even get the technology files required to layout the processor without signing an NDA.

Here's the sad truth of it. You're dealing with a proprietary process anywhere from the chip level down. You simply cannot complain about not having open silicon and be taken seriously. Here's how it works:

If you want to make a chip, the first thing you have to do is find a design. Now you can make your own, and open source it, or you can get a pre-made design. If you choose to use an open-source design, then you're good--so far--but you'll have a significant performance lag behind the proprietary options. This goes double for video processing, memory controllers, buses, etc., etc.

Next, you need to find a fab who will make the chips for you. Here's where it gets bad. Even 180nm fabs consider their processes to be trade secrets, so that you have to sign an NDA just to get a process description file from the fab--this means your layout is, perforce, closed source.

Even if you somehow find a fab which will allow you to open the technology file, the placement and routing software for VLSI design is all closed source and patented. This is because place & route is a HARD problem. NP Hard, in fact.

So what it comes down to is this: until the homecmos people get their process going, you're stuck with something proprietary at some level. So then how much proprietary stuff is tolerable?

The Raspberry Pi Foundation had the goal of being bringing computing in a low cost package for education. The tradeoffs required to use open designs for the processor are quite steep: e.g. it would be a colossal time investment to get Linux running on a non-standard--read: non-proprietary--SoC. Using some proprietary chips to get there seems reasonable, so long as the OS doesn't become proprietary. The GPU blob is unfortunate, but not unexpected, particularly if you want decent performance.

It doesn't really matter whether a joke is grammatically correct. I remember having read the joke on alt.tasteless.jokes and I found it really funny back then. The words "close to" simply don't roll that well. I maintain this even as non-native English speaker.

The link Gerontas Pastitios Case: Greece is becoming Iran with the "eulogy" of Golden Dawn (in Greek).

And the english translation here

It's been over 60 years since the first A-bomb. Why doesn't everyone have one? Even third-rate powers have jet fighters.

Building a bomb isn't that hard a job if you have enriched uranium. It's comparable to building an automobile engine - not easy, but a good racing shop could do it. Machining uranium can be done in a standard machine shop with some extra precautions. (Plutonium is much worse.) Machining beryllium is probably more dangerous. Casting and X-raying the explosive lenses is tough, but it doesn't take a big shop. Generating the 1ns rise time power pulse to fire the explosives is a lot easier than it was in the tube era. Between what the US and the USSR have published, there are few secrets left about low-end bomb design.

Gaseous diffusion plants are huge. Oak Ridge Novouralsk. Drome, France. Those things are the size of big steel mills. Entire "nuclear cities" were built around them. Only major countries could afford them.

Then came centrifuge plants. Here's one in the US. URENCO USA. It looks like a big data center, just some big commercial buildings and a parking lot. It's on the outskirts of a town in New Mexico, along with some other unrelated industries. Any reasonably successful country, or even a big company, can afford a centrifuge plant. URENCO is on their third generation of centrifuges, and price/performance improves with each generation. Now countries like India and Pakistan were able to get into the game.

Laser enrichment will reduce the scale even further. Lawerence Livermore had laser enrichment working in the 1990s, but it wasn't cost-effective. Now it is. A laser enrichment plant is a modest operation, perhaps a quarter of the size of a centrifuge plant of the same capacity.

All these processes are multi-stage, with each stage doing some separation and feeding a slightly more concentrated product into the next state. The minimum plant size before you get anything is still reasonably big.

There's work going on towards single-stage laser separation systems. That's a worry, because a very small plant, over time, could enrich enough uranium for a bomb. So far, if anyone knows how to make that work, they're not saying much. But eventually it will be figured out.

It's been over 60 years since the first A-bomb. Why doesn't everyone have one? Even third-rate powers have jet fighters.

Building a bomb isn't that hard a job if you have enriched uranium. It's comparable to building an automobile engine - not easy, but a good racing shop could do it. Machining uranium can be done in a standard machine shop with some extra precautions. (Plutonium is much worse.) Machining beryllium is probably more dangerous. Casting and X-raying the explosive lenses is tough, but it doesn't take a big shop. Generating the 1ns rise time power pulse to fire the explosives is a lot easier than it was in the tube era. Between what the US and the USSR have published, there are few secrets left about low-end bomb design.

Gaseous diffusion plants are huge. Oak Ridge Novouralsk. Drome, France. Those things are the size of big steel mills. Entire "nuclear cities" were built around them. Only major countries could afford them.

Then came centrifuge plants. Here's one in the US. URENCO USA. It looks like a big data center, just some big commercial buildings and a parking lot. It's on the outskirts of a town in New Mexico, along with some other unrelated industries. Any reasonably successful country, or even a big company, can afford a centrifuge plant. URENCO is on their third generation of centrifuges, and price/performance improves with each generation. Now countries like India and Pakistan were able to get into the game.

Laser enrichment will reduce the scale even further. Lawerence Livermore had laser enrichment working in the 1990s, but it wasn't cost-effective. Now it is. A laser enrichment plant is a modest operation, perhaps a quarter of the size of a centrifuge plant of the same capacity.

All these processes are multi-stage, with each stage doing some separation and feeding a slightly more concentrated product into the next state. The minimum plant size before you get anything is still reasonably big.

There's work going on towards single-stage laser separation systems. That's a worry, because a very small plant, over time, could enrich enough uranium for a bomb. So far, if anyone knows how to make that work, they're not saying much. But eventually it will be figured out.

It's been over 60 years since the first A-bomb. Why doesn't everyone have one? Even third-rate powers have jet fighters.

Building a bomb isn't that hard a job if you have enriched uranium. It's comparable to building an automobile engine - not easy, but a good racing shop could do it. Machining uranium can be done in a standard machine shop with some extra precautions. (Plutonium is much worse.) Machining beryllium is probably more dangerous. Casting and X-raying the explosive lenses is tough, but it doesn't take a big shop. Generating the 1ns rise time power pulse to fire the explosives is a lot easier than it was in the tube era. Between what the US and the USSR have published, there are few secrets left about low-end bomb design.

Gaseous diffusion plants are huge. Oak Ridge Novouralsk. Drome, France. Those things are the size of big steel mills. Entire "nuclear cities" were built around them. Only major countries could afford them.

Then came centrifuge plants. Here's one in the US. URENCO USA. It looks like a big data center, just some big commercial buildings and a parking lot. It's on the outskirts of a town in New Mexico, along with some other unrelated industries. Any reasonably successful country, or even a big company, can afford a centrifuge plant. URENCO is on their third generation of centrifuges, and price/performance improves with each generation. Now countries like India and Pakistan were able to get into the game.

Laser enrichment will reduce the scale even further. Lawerence Livermore had laser enrichment working in the 1990s, but it wasn't cost-effective. Now it is. A laser enrichment plant is a modest operation, perhaps a quarter of the size of a centrifuge plant of the same capacity.

All these processes are multi-stage, with each stage doing some separation and feeding a slightly more concentrated product into the next state. The minimum plant size before you get anything is still reasonably big.

There's work going on towards single-stage laser separation systems. That's a worry, because a very small plant, over time, could enrich enough uranium for a bomb. So far, if anyone knows how to make that work, they're not saying much. But eventually it will be figured out.

yeah, he just explains how he and he conceived the prank when someone asked him to, followed by screenshots of the greek blogs and a newspaper ( eleftheri ora - free hour ) which reproduced the "miracle".

most of his chat with his friend about the story of the miracle is in screenshots, so google translate won't do much but here is the translated link http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=el&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fvlahatasamis.blogspot.gr%2F2012%2F08%2Fblog-post_1999.html&act=url

I'm not a drinker, but it seems to me that alcohol consumption is as much a social activity as anything. And how long does it take you to consume a shot of vodka? That's why people go out for a beer after work, not just drinking: they can hang out with their friends, complain about the boss, argue about sports, etc., while they sip their beers.

(I live in a town where beer is a key part of local culture. My being a teetotaler is one of two big reasons I feel like an outsider, the other being my lack of tatoos.)

And if you ask for a glass of draft beer in a bar, it will be a pint, though the exact meaning of the word varies.

I'm not a drinker, but it seems to me that alcohol consumption is as much a social activity as anything. And how long does it take you to consume a shot of vodka? That's why people go out for a beer after work, not just drinking: they can hang out with their friends, complain about the boss, argue about sports, etc., while they sip their beers.

(I live in a town where beer is a key part of local culture. My being a teetotaler is one of two big reasons I feel like an outsider, the other being my lack of tatoos.)

And if you ask for a glass of draft beer in a bar, it will be a pint, though the exact meaning of the word varies.

but a different way of doing the same thing as this: http://www.google.com/patents?id=_I4WAAAAEBAJ

A google search didn't turn up anything useful, but it sounds like you've got a good handle on what's available.

Do they offer the 3-way LED bulbs yet? I'm not talking about dimmable ones (I know they exist), but rather the ones that work in sockets designed for these kinds of incandescent bulbs, providing three levels of light. My floor lamps are all of this kind, and I use each of the settings in different situations.

I did a google search and had no problem finding 3 way CFL bulbs.
https://www.google.com/search?q=three%20way%20compact%20florescent&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&source=hp&channel=np

I have seen them in stores too so they shouldn't be too hard to find. They are just like the incandescent in your link with two sets of intertwined CFLs built into one socket to provide three possible light settings.

Luckily Android can be very customized and thus we can work around this.

This can be blocked if you use an alternative Dialer App.
E.g. Exdialer (free).

Read the XDA thread where they investigate.

"The best solution i see at the moment is to install another dialer - when you navigate to malicious page android will display "choose dialer" dialog before doing anything, and you can cancel the operation by pressing back button. Just don't check "default" checkbox." (Source).

Of course, a confirmation dialogue should have been shown for *any* USSD codes.

To be honest, I still find it crazy that anybody can borrow a Samsung-phone and press *2767*3855# on the dialer and it would wipe it. This will probably not be fixed even if Samsung patches the dialer.

I'm pretty sure Eolas' technique was never published in a book because nobody would find it to be worth reading about.

They had a product out in 1995.

I said patents should only be granted for things that are very much non-obvious. We can argue about how obviousness should be quantified or established, but I think it should be a factor when granting the privilege of a monopoly.

Well, do you have a suggestion for a test that's better than the current test for obviousness?

1) It is close enough to being a patent on hyperlinks that BT was willing to assert in court that it was a patent on hyperlinks. While it failed for various technical reasons, it's pretty reasonable to think that the USPTO would have approved a similar patent application that got the technical details for a hyperlink right, had such a patent been filed. So, hyperlinks probably could have been patented even if they weren't. That raises the legitimate question: Does our society really benefit from granting patents on things that trivial?

I don't necessarily agree with that conclusion. Who is to say that the USPTO would have approved a different patent application on hyperlinks or not? That said, the patent was filed in the 1970s. If it got the technical details for a hyperlink right, then they would have invented hyperlinks a decade ahead of Berners-Lee, so why shouldn't such a patent be granted?
Additionally, does society benefit from new innovations like hyperlinks? Absolutely. We wouldn't be having this discussion otherwise.

2) How much money did Prodigy and others pay in legal fees to defend themselves? Fighting bad patents is very expensive, and the benefit to society of publishing an obvious idea is minimal, so why should society grant patents on things that are obvious?

Society shouldn't grant patents on things that are obvious. However, obviousness still must be supported by evidence, rather than gut feelings.

I'm well aware that it wasn't a licensing fee, but that misses the point. Eolas didn't offer a license for $100 or even $250. I believe it was tens of millions of dollars, but I'm not going to spend the time hunting for a reference -- it was, inevitably, some fraction of what they thought they could win in court. The scenario you described, where the existence of the patent benefits both the patent holder and the licensees because the licensees pay less for the idea than it would have cost to develop it themselves almost never holds in reality (I'll assert that without any statistics to back it up). Licenses are often (again, I'm just asserting this, but it makes sense since court awards seem to be based on volume of usage rather than effort to develop) "$X per unit shipped" (or similarly based on volume of usage) rather than a flat fee, so you get Eolas demanding tens of millions of dollars for a few hours of work that you would have rather done (and did do) yourself.

But, on the other hand, they're asking for a small percentage of the billions of dollars you made. For example, in the Microsoft v. i4i trial, i4i was awarded $240 million in damages (and if Microsoft had taken a license rather than going through a full trial, it would have presumably been much less)... During the years that trial occurred, Microsoft earned around $20 billion on Office... each year. It's still a tiny fraction of the income. Frankly, I'd be delighted to pay $200 million in license fees if I was pocketing $19,800 million in revenue.

If the procedure is known, and the tool/technology is known, then the combination is obvious. No such patents exist.

I wish that were true, but it isn't. Here is an example (sorry if it is a bit industry-specific).

1.8e-11 m/s^2

And power loss from synchrotron radiation at that acceleration 4e-49 eV/year.

As said, that results in a very long timescale by itself. But if there are any collisions, the acceleration is much, much, higher and the gas will slowly radiate power on astronomical timescales. And there is or was collisions at some point if the gas has a thermal distribution.

1.8e-11 m/s^2

And power loss from synchrotron radiation at that acceleration 4e-49 eV/year.

As said, that results in a very long timescale by itself. But if there are any collisions, the acceleration is much, much, higher and the gas will slowly radiate power on astronomical timescales. And there is or was collisions at some point if the gas has a thermal distribution.

... and that means more invasive advertising. Google will do it too eventually.

What could possibly be more invasive than tracking a user's every interaction with a Web site?

Most modern complicated websites do this to be honest. It makes debugging problems raised by users much more straightforward since you can actually look in the logs (not apache logs, they don't provide enough info to debug the internals of your application when form posts or session stuff is involved) and see what the user was doing when things went wrong.

Ideally we would not have to do this but since most users can't file a decent bug report to save their miserable lives you have to be able to follow their exact user journey through the site to replicate their issue. Any information you need to help you diagnose problems in an application need to be gathered within the application as even support monkeys will not be able gather exactly what you need all the time as they are not familiar with the internals.

That is also assuming the user with a problem gets to speak to the support dude who is a wannabe developer biding his time and getting work experience instead of the vast majority in my experience who are too stupid and lazy to any investigation of a users problem before sending it on the dev team.

I was auditing my Noscript whitelist. For every domain in the whitelist, I checked the Noscript page on it - such as http://noscript.net/about/test.com;test.com.

I am puzzled by the Google Safe Browsing Diagnostic results. It yields worrying results for a lot of domains that are listed as safe by all the other tools.
For example, see http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=gmodules.com

What am I supposed to do? It seems that every other domain (including important domains like gmodules.com) has acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware! Should I block them all (excluding some very essential ones)?

As soon as bing maps or open street map get brought up to the quality of google maps, I'll contemplate a switch.

Google maps vladivostok
OpenStreetMap Vladivostok
Bing Maps Vladivostok

What makes you think open street map or bing are not at the quality of google maps? Both have flawed areas, both have extremely well mapped areas.

Yeah, in real life Android integrates far better with Exchange than either an iPhone or a BlackBerry. I dunno about windows phones, we haven't got any.

Blackberry needs BES if you are federally regulated (like any public corporation or HIPAA entity) which is a whole nuther server, for crying out loud.

And of course the iPhone has the stupid timezone calendaring bug which has been known to cause epic mail loops.

For practically all people, the cost of their electric bill would increase more than they were spending on gasoline.

This may be true in some areas of the US perhaps (and even then, I'd like to see figures); but here in Europe where many of us pay the equivalent of $8.80 per gallon for petrol, electricity from the grid is significantly cheaper.

Thing is, Android is for hackers.

No, it's not.

It's open source. Who's that of interest to - accountants?

Absolutely. It's for accountants at carriers and OEMs who want a platform with no R&D expense.

And lawyers. Licensing is always about lawyers.

The fact that the terms of the license happen to mean that a few incidental hackers can get the source and tinker with it is a minor side benefit. Google's main purpose in open-sourcing Android is to get as many OEMs using the platform as possible, so that as many end users will be storing their information on Google's servers as possibles

Apple has no slogan. Don't know where you got that idea.

Perhaps from here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-525181561056700741

Or maybe it was this.

Or from The Prophet himself (may his turtleneck never sag)? http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiouslee/5807458526/

Or one of the other half million hits you can find when your mom overcomes her revulsion to your drooling for long enough to show you how to use Google.

Good idea. You should go look up what "slogan" means.

That's not a slogan, any more than "Don't be evil" is Google's slogan. (Really, it's not, never was.) They're both lines from various public statements that became internet memes.

Only four connections? Just get a big bag of tee connectors.

... and that means more invasive advertising. Google will do it too eventually.

What could possibly be more invasive than tracking a user's every interaction with a Web site?

This beef is not going to people who are starving. Here in the USA the opposite is our problem, people are eating too much.

... and yet we have kids who don't get enough to eat.

As the Resident Pakistani Slashdotteur (lol a la francaise), allow me to elucidate.

Frankly, our dear PM is pulling a Kirchner. You might be wondering, what the hell does the Argentine President have to do with this? The answer is: both pull-out totally unrelated issues to hide the real deal. For Kirchner it's the Falklands, for our dear prime-minister, its the religion card.

The economy is in the shitter, our PM raison d'etre is to prevent our president from being jailed (no really, that is why he was appointed, to continue the job when the court dismissed the other one for doing the same), people are jobless, we have rolling blackouts, and the government is doing literally nothing except scheme to extend their reign.

So when your popularity is below that of a rabid dog, you will clutch at straws. And how nice of the US to provide some.

And then our leaders will conveniently realise they are Muslims, and suddenly act all pious. The bastards, even the president of Uruguay is more muslim than you!

Fear not, this is just hot air, our PM will just bark out popular sentiments, and ride out the wave. And when his popularity graph is high, and people have been sufficiently distracted from the fact that people are summarily shipping their entire frikin' factories en masse to such *backward* locations as Bangladesh and Kenya, they will go back to saving the President from the Swiss courts.

(I have lived in Kenya ['94-'99], best fucking place in the universe, everything I have ever learnt, I owe it to my black, christian, teachers there. They knocked into me my habit of reading, and I can't thank them enough)

Look, we know the real deal, we know that the Friday holiday (with conveniently down cellphone networks) was not about protesting, it was for their thugs to have a grand loot.

And our dear blasphemy law, you think non-muslims are the only target? It's a very convenient law to eliminate people you don't like, muslim or non-muslim (like the poor building owner, who was *turned* in by his non paying tenant...)

Our *democracy* is a farce, our people are intentionally being kept illiterate by feudal lords (best thing India ever did was to eliminate the landlord system).We have no fucking clue what the hell is going on.

Like my MNA (representative), he has never shown his bloody face in my area (he is being implicated in a drug scandal, btw), but was here on friday to hold up the road (he held a rally in the friggin' crossroads! which I don't blame him, since we don't actually have open spaces or parks...) To remind us he was a full blooded Muslim, and thus we should vote for him, er.. DOWN WITH THE INFIDELS!

So please, please, don't associate us with our damn politicians. We didn't elect them, we can't control them, we don't even know them.

As the joke goes, we have three type of people in Pakistan: Those who are too poor to move abroad, those who who are tying to move abroad, and those who have come back from abroad to rule the roost.

By the way, I suggest y'all hop by /r/pakistan (and /r/islam for that matter) sometimes. Come to the dark side, we have nihari :P

(Oh, and dear slashdot, please support character accents, or my french teacher will hang me from the university lamppost :P)

From this:

"...the opinion of many scientists was that some 90% of the three billion DNA letters in our cells has no function at all--calling it “junk DNA.” Now, a ten year follow-on research project is beginning to publish discoveries centered within this so called junk DNA code. Like the complex rule base of an expert system on a computer, it is now estimated that 80% of our DNA contains a “complex network of regulatory switches that control how cells interpret the genetic instructions contained in DNA.”"

-and-

US Patent #4,318,184:
1982 patent that relates to generative process planning derived from design and material specifications.

"This interlocking network of regulatory switches that control gene activity certainly seems to me to be similar to an expert system. An expert system is carefully designed, with complex interactions between the rules of the system, often based on man-centuries of research and experience. As a programmer, it would be ludicrous to think that complicated programming logic similar to the production expert systems we worked on in industry could “write itself,” without intelligence or design."

Yet, that's exactly what's happened with DNA, over millions of years, from a pool of primordial sludge of amino acids and RNA to where we are now, a veritable feast of complex organisms. As a technological culture we're about to the point where growing earlobes on the backs of laboratory mice is done for giggles these days. All we're doing is rewriting some code, albeit using a soup of chemicals and an electric charge in lieu of a keyboard. And by applying the language of the engineer to the biological process, chemical engineers are able to con us all by demanding royalty with menaces on the use of something we were all born with.

Thing is, Android is for hackers.

No, it's not.

It's open source. Who's that of interest to - accountants?

There are forked versions of it (e.g. Cyanogenmod) - who created those - poets?

Apple has no slogan. Don't know where you got that idea.

Perhaps from here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-525181561056700741

Or maybe it was this.

Or from The Prophet himself (may his turtleneck never sag)? http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiouslee/5807458526/

Or one of the other half million hits you can find when your mom overcomes her revulsion to your drooling for long enough to show you how to use Google.

Wait a minute. Was the jury foreman using some pre release version of iPhone6 and did not have google maps? That could explain why he did not follow it.

I think this might be the one.

Web browser maybe, but sticking ads everywhere isn't the same as installing it everywhere. Maps is a part of their search product, so you know, you can search for physical locations. Next thing you'll be saying is Google is using their web search monopoly to push image searching, weather forecasting and calculator services.

Web browser maybe, but sticking ads everywhere isn't the same as installing it everywhere. Maps is a part of their search product, so you know, you can search for physical locations. Next thing you'll be saying is Google is using their web search monopoly to push image searching, weather forecasting and calculator services.